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The Muralist by B.A. Shapiro: book review





The Muralist (2015) is about the disappearance of Alizee Benoit in New York City in 1940, and seventy-five years later in 2015 when her great-niece, Danielle Abrams, tries to solve the mystery.

On the eve of the Second World War, 22-year-old American mural painter Alizee Benoit, is working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). When the president’s wife, and arts patron, Eleanor Roosevelt, visits the WPA, Alizee spontaneously begins a bold conversation about the need for ‘innovative’ and ‘forceful’ abstract murals. This conversation gains some interest from the First Lady.

Soon after the conversation, Alizee disappears. Not even her Jewish family living in German-occupied France, knows where she is. Not even her artist friends, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner, knows where she is.

Alizee’s great-niece Danielle Abrams unearths the works of the famous Abstract Expressionist artists 70 years after her great aunt went missing. But did the artists or their works hold the answers to her aunt’s disappearance? There were rumours that Alizee was Rothko’s lover, and that Pollock was jealous. Was her Jewish heritage and pre-war politics part of the answer. Was she arrested as a suspected political agitator? Or was she bipolar and suicidal, or an amnesiac who got lost?

In addition to being a novel of mystery, mixing fictional characters with real-life people, it also outlines the historical beginnings of the American school of Abstract Expressionism. It explores whether art is political and whether politics defines art.

It is an interesting beginning – the entanglement of art and war-time propaganda – but it was not quite gripping enough for me. If a reader is interested in the art scene of the times, the abstract artists were not well developed, focusing predominantly on three now-famous names, without full knowledge of the many American and European artists experimenting in the genre at the time that were also influential and influenced. For readers of mysteries, it is light but rises in parts. For those seeking Franco-American linkages, there is some of that. In combination, the novel is a reasonable read.


MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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